I’ve made a few changes around here. I added to the blogroll (make sure you check out two new St. Louis area bloggers The Listless Lawyer and Steve Priest, along with new favorites Jeff Harrell at The Shape of Days, the reportage of Michael Yon from Iraq, the left/right discussion at Debate Space, and the writings of Paul Graham thanks to Mark). 

I finally corrected the link to the Belmont Club (finally!) – I’m hoping wretchard doesn’t get his hosting problems fixed because it will be a while before I’ll get around to updating the link. Sadly I dropped a couple (Good Luck Brad!) from the blogroll which I only do (except for rare circumstances) because the blogger announces an end or long hiatus, or simply stops posting for many months.

And I’ve started category archives, so you can peruse what my fellow authors (Sean and Carl) have written in the past by subject. I have probably half the posts categorized and will get to the rest at flank speed. 

We work overtime here at Funmurphys just to satisfy our readers. Please leave any other ideas right here in the comment section to this post.

The last couple of days I’ve been getting a lot of hits (for me, anyway) from Norway and I haven’t a clue why. If I’d finally gotten around to writing the monster post about Njal’s Saga and culture I’ve been meaning to do for the last 3 years I could understand (and yes, Skarp-Hedin is my favorite character in the book), but it’s been the same old same old around here. Technorati and Google haven’t been any help in figuring out why they are coming and the two trackers I use show them coming but no link. So if you’re reading this in Norway, please leave a comment telling me how you found out about this site.

Powerline has reprinted the best piece on the relationship of blogging to newspapers I’ve read yet. Here’s a taste of what Phil Boas had to say:

Here’s what newspaper editors and writers should know about this new Internet phenomenon. Bloggers don’t have much respect for you. You are the “legacy media,” the MSM. You’re the Roman Catholic Church to their Martin Luther and his new high-speed cable modem. To Hugh Hewitt (hughhewitt.com), the blogosphere’s leading cheerleader and one of its most polished practitioners, you are Stalingrad in 1944. Your institutions are hollowed out and your walls are scorched. 

But of course, Stalingrad held, didn’t it. And that gets me to the second definition of bloggers. They are your light in the tunnel. The newspaper industry has known for a long time that eventually wood pulp would give way to microprocessors. That long-awaited paradigm shift now seems imminent. We may very soon be predominately an electronic medium and that has many print executives on edge.

…

We are headed to the Web in a big way and our readers, especially our most engaged readers – the bloggers – are going with us. They are giving us a taste now of what our new environment will be like. They will challenge and cajole us to confront our biases and our mistakes. And if we don’t confront them, they’ll clean our clocks.

That’s just a taste – you should read the whole thing.

Tom McMahon has posted his very own law:

Whenever a blogger posts at length about a hateful e-mail he has received instead of responding to the legitimate arguments advanced by the other side, that blogger has lost the debate.

Tom, maybe one day, and soon, your McMahon’s Law will take it’s rightful place in the pantheon of universal laws, right above Parkinson’s Law, but below Murphy’s Law.

Something to boggle the mind:  Somebody is paying 1.85 billion dollars for Ask Jeeves. Yes, that’s right, I said billion. Of course, they aren’t actually paying cash, they are swapping their stock for Ask Jeeves stock, and the stock market valued Ask Jeeves at 1.43 billion dollars Friday at close, so maybe the deal isn’t as crazy as it sounds at first blush. And when you consider that the market values Google at just under 50 billion dollars, maybe it’s me that’s crazy. Here I talk about convergence last week, and I’m astonished when the market has already priced it in. 

And Yahoo bought Flickr for “undisclosed terms” — well, to be disclosed later. 

All this makes me wonder what my little internet company is worth — OK, it’s not really a company, but if people are prepared to provide me with real legal tender for it, it could become one real quick. Here that, Barry Diller?

It would seem that Steven Levy has forgotten the famous cartoon punchline, on the Internet, nobody know’s you’re a dog. Mr. Levy thinks the top ranks of Bloggerdom isn’t sufficiently representative of the rainbow of America. Well, McQ applies his usual reality check, and I’ll supply mine.

Back when I started The Murphy Nexus, which was an online family newsletter with a difference, most of the people I linked to and was linked by were women. Another woman who I knew from posting at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Forums once asked my why that was, almost as if it were a bad thing. I had to consider that because I hadn’t ever examined my linkeragy based on gender, race, etc. My answer was that what I found interesting in connection with a family newsletter was mostly being written by women, and the people who found my little corner of cyber-space link worthy were women.

If you were to examine my list of links from this here blog, you’ll find that there are more men then women. Again, not that I’ve paid attention or tried to link to more men, but that’s just who I’ve found I wanted to link to. I have never linked to anyone or not linked to anyone because of their gender, race, etc. I have linked to people simply because I like to read them. Some I have found because they linked to me first and so showed up in referrer logs. Most I have found the old fashioned way – somebody else linked to them. I try to link to people who make me think, or make me laugh, (hopefully both). I don’t link to only people I agree with. Generally I don’t even notice the person’s name until I go to link them and I look for it as I try to list people by name and not by blog name. Now, that doesn’t always mean much — for example if you can’t figure out that Busymom is written by a woman, you’re not heteronormative enough.

I’m curious as to what the solution is to achieve sexual and racial parity of hits on blogs. If you’re links don’t match the sexual and racial distribution of … what, you’re county, state, nation, the world? you won’t be linked to by … like minded people? I suppose that’s the beauty of blogging – there is no top down control. There is no way to impose solutions from the top — they have to come from the bottom up. You can’t make bloggers link a certain way, but you can persuade them. 

UPDATE:

Jeff Jarvis has a lengthy entry on this subject which I substantially agree with.

Shelley Powers has a lengthy post too with a lot of good points and insight. I have to say even though I don’t agree politically with her and understand half of what she says when she goes all technical, I love her blog. It’s a treat to read her and an honor to link to her.

When I’ve had the time, I haven’t had the inclination, and when I’ve had the inclination, I haven’t had the time to post to the blog. Seeing as how this is the Christmas season which is the most stressful time of the year, well, no doubt I’ll be posting up a storm.

On a blog related note, I didn’t have to change my colors to show my solidarity with Ukrainian Freedom and Democracy, I’ve always been orange. It’s the Scotch-Irish in me (along with a like of the blue/orange color scheme that dates back into childhood). I wonder how my college chum Modest Osadsa, who used to verbally berate the communists when they tried to talk/leaflet at meals, feels about it.